The gang wars that left New York littered with bodies BEFORE the Mafia's Five Families ruled: How the tit-for-tat Tong wars brought bloody but well-dressed terror to Chinatown

• The
four Tong Wars started in 1900 and raged on for 25 years in New York

• There
were men armed with hatchets executing their rivals and open warfare on the
streets of Chinatown

• In
Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money and Murder in New York's Chinatown
Scott D Seligman gives a history of the gang-torn area

• The
On Leong Tong and the Hip Sing Tong, its bitter rival, kicked off the first war
as they accused one another of criminality in the press

• The
Tongs flourished in the late 1800s as New York became more popular for Chinese
immigrants, who had previously migrated to California

By DAN BATES FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

It was the bloody conflict that
was omitted from the Martin Scorsese movie 'Gangs of New York'.

But the Tong Wars were as brutal
as any that were dramatized in the Oscar-winning film, according to a new book.

The four Tong Wars raged on and
off more than 25 years and left dozens of people dead as bodies piled up in
Chinatown in Manhattan.

During the tit-for-tat killings,
one of the Tongs - the Chinese word for gang - was tortured to death with meat
cleavers by murderers who cut his nose off.

In another incident, gang members
were shot dead and two civilians were killed during a mass execution at a
theater.

And in another event, a
22-year-old white missionary was caught up in the mayhem when she was strangled
by her lover in Chinatown.

The Tong Wars saw men armed with
hatchets executing their rivals and open warfare on the streets of New York
that corrupt police were powerless to prevent.

According to Tong Wars: The
Untold Story of Vice, Money and Murder in New York's Chinatown, by Scott D
Seligman, the gangsters wore pinstripe suits, fedora hats and had their collars
pulled up.

Their weapons of choice included
a six-shot derringer and the meat cleaver.

Seligman tells for the first time
how the gangs of Chinatown were as brutal as their more famous Italian or Irish
counterparts.

The Tongs flourished in the late
1800s as New York became more popular for Chinese immigrants, who had
previously migrated to California.

In 1870, however, California
enacted laws preventing them from working on public projects and authorizing
cities to relocate them outside of their boundaries.

But not even the Chinese
Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned further immigration from Chinese laborers
for ten years and banned those in the United States from obtaining citizenship
discouraged more from coming.

Chinatown developed in an area
south of Canal Street in Manhattan in a neighborhood that until then had been
occupied by Irish immigrants.

The Chinese lived in cramped
apartments where landlords had built extra floors into high ceilinged rooms to
cram in an extra set of beds.

In 1875 the New York state census
recorded only 157 Chinese people in the the city. In reality, however, there
were were much more, and by 1880 the New York Times estimated the real number
to be at 4,500.

By that time there were an
estimated 300 Chinese laundries in the city with many other Chinese working in
restaurants, cigar makers and other skilled trades.

But there was also a criminal
element who ran the illicit gambling parlors and opium dens, writes Seligman, a
former congressional legislative assistant who is fluent in Mandarin.

The most powerful Chinese
immigrant at the time was Tom Lee, who Seligman calls a 'a crafty man with no
small levels of ambition' who came to America when he was 14 having been born
in Guangzhou.

He was sent to New York by the
Six Companies, San Francisco Chinatown's supreme governing body, a fraternal
organization in the United States was an umbrella group of different agencies.

Such agencies were referred to by
the name 'Tong', meaning chamber. Another word for them was 'triad', which is
more commonly used today.

With the authority of the Six
Companies, Tom Lee was effectively put in charge of the Chinese community in
New York in the 1870s.

He was a social climber and
realized the value of connections outside his community, especially at City
Hall and the police department.

Tom Lee courted them with gifts,
and in September 1881, he arranged a picnic on Staten Island for 50 Chinese
residents and a handful of invited - and influential - guests.

He became known as the 'Mayor of
Mott Street' and was the most important figure in the Chinese community.

in 1880 Tom Lee founded his new
organization, the Loon Yee Tong, whose name translates as 'Chamber United in
Friendship', a mixture of trade union, fraternity and advocacy group, that
served as a sort of Chinese Masonic lodge.

The initiation ritual involved
suspending a sword over a recruit's head as he recited 36 oaths of allegiance.
His finger was pricked and a drop of blood was put into some wine which was
drunk by all in the room to symbolize brotherhood.

'Loyalty and obedience were
valued above all else,' Seligman writes.

By 1884 Tom Lee was thought to be
running 16 gambling establishments in Little China, the precursor to Chinatown;
Gamblers paid $8 per table per week with a third going to him and the rest
given to the police.

Lee also made money from using
his police contacts to keep cops away from opium dens or giving the owners a
warning they were about to be raided.

He was also not afraid to have
rivals killed if it suited him.

As Seligman writes, it was Tom
Lee's other gang, the On Leong Tong, and the Hip Sing Tong, its bitter rival,
that would cause the first of the Tong Wars.

The Hip Sing Tong started in San
Francisco and translates as 'Chamber United in Victory'.

The organization made a fortune
from smuggling people into the US for $200 a time and were also known as the
'Highbinders'.

One report from the time said
they were a 'famous secret society of thugs and murderers...who haunt the dirty
basements'.

While Tom Lee had always paid
some of his earnings from gambling to the police and politicians, the Hip Sing
Tong kept it all for themselves and were far more mercenary.

As Seligman puts it: 'The On
Leongs were selling protection from the police. The Hip Sings were selling
protection from themselves.'

The Hip Sings were led by Young
Mock Duck, who claimed to have been born in San Francisco in 1879 but there
were no records to back this up.

Seligman writes that he looked
'slim and delicate, almost girlish in demeanor' but his appearance belied how
he had the 'spirit of a tiger'.

In the years to come Mock Duck
achieved almost mythical status and children in Chinatown came to believe that
he had supernatural powers like being able to see around corners, deflect
bullets from his skin and read people's minds.

During the 1980s the On Leongs
and the Hip Sings fought a PR war with both sides accusing the other of
criminality through newspaper reports planted with friendly journalists.

The violence properly began on
August 12, 1900, in the hallway of a tenement at 9 Pell Street when four On
Leong gunmen ambushed a Hip Sing laundryman who was in Chinatown for his usual
Sunday visit.

The killer, Sin Cue, and three
others were arrested and soon after police learned that the plan had been to
kill four Hip Sings, but the others had escaped.

The Hip Sings responded by
putting a $3,000 bounty on Tom Lee's head.

Tom Lee told a friend: 'They are
after me now', adding: 'Some day I go like that', with a snap of his fingers.

The Hip Sings finally got their
revenge when Sin Cue visited Pell Street that September with his friend Ah Fee.

They were ambushed by six armed
Hip Sings who threw pepper in their faces and beat them with an iron bar.

During the carnage the Hip Sings,
including Mock Duck and henchman Sue Sing, fired a gun and a stray bullet hit a
female passer by and slightly injured her two children.

Ah Fee was shot twice and died of
his injuries.

Mock Duck and the four other Hip
Sings were put on trial but before the case began Sin Cue, the man who would
have been the prosecution's key witness, died after his home was set on fire,
causing him to leap off the balcony to his death.

The blaze was started when a pan
of cooking oil was left on a burner in a restaurant below - and looked
extremely suspicious.

Mock Duck's first trial resulted
in a hung jury but a white witness revealed they had been given a note saying
that if they gave evidence they would 'die to-day'.

It read: 'Pepper in your eyes and
bullet in your heart. You no go alive...best thing you die so you make no more
witness for Chinese.'

The note was signed, 'One, Two,
Three', which appears to have been a Tong-related code.

Mock Duck would appear before
judges dozens of times after this but on each occasion the police could never
make the charges stick

In November 1904 he survived an
assassination attempt when he was shot twice as he came up some steps from the
basement of 18 Pell Street.

Mock Duck's assailant, an On
Leong called Lee Sing, calmly walked toward him from over the road and opened
fire at close range.

The second bullet grazed him and
the first lodged in his stomach having bounced off his belt, a deflection which
saved his life.

Police later learned that there
had been a secret meeting of the On Leong Tong in which lots were drawn to see
who would kill Mock Duck.

By this stage the press began to
call the fight a 'Tong War' for the first time.

The New York World newspaper said
it was 'quite as deadly as the Italian Mafia or the Black Hand'.

Later that month, after Mock Duck
was released from hospital, the two Tongs exchanged gunfire in what the New
York Sun called a 'regular highbinder six-shooter war dance on the Bowery' .

Police recovered battle gear from
the Hip Sings which included four coats of armor including one vest made of
steel rings woven together which was resistant to bullets - which caused deep
alarm among law enforcement.

Innocent bystander John Baldwin,
a white man who was drinking at a saloon on the Bowery was shot and died of his
injuries.

This sparked an unprecedented
level of attention from the city and police, so both Tongs turned to means
other than violence to disrupt the other.

Over Christmas two On Leongs
posed as out of town laundrymen and lured 15 Hip Sings to a gambling den - then
reported them to the police.

When the officers arrived the On
Leongs pulled an iron ring which opened a trap door in the floor, sending all
the Hip Sings plunging into two feet of water below.

The cops eventually got in and
arrested them all.

In January 1905 the next body
fell - this time another Hip Sing.

Huie Fong was ambushed on Mott
Street by a man who blasted three shots at him from close range.

According to a newspaper report,
a police detective who was two doors away rushed to the scene and found Huie
Fong 'flapping like a landed trout' which blood gushing from the two holes in
his chest.

Soon after the On Leongs declared
that for every time one of their properties was raided based on a tip from the
Hip Sings 'there would be another dead Hip Sing'.

The Hip Sings responded by
putting up red signs reminding people of the $3,000 bounty on Tom Lee's head.

The On Leongs retaliated by
crushing the skull of Ching Gon, a Hip Sing who had moved out of Chinatown. He
died of his injuries.

The Hip Sings' response was to
shoot dead Lee Yu, a senior On Leong and one of Tom Lee's cousins.

Seligman writes that this left
the Hip Sings 'jubilant' as they thought they finally had the better of their
rivals.

What proved to be a 'watershed'
moment in the war was the massacre at the Chinese Theater on Doyers Street.

The slaughter was shocking
because it happened on what was considered neutral ground where On Leongs and
Hip Sings could go and enjoy a play without the fear of violence.

On August 6, 1905, several Hip
Sing men entered the theater during a performance of a Cantonese drama called
'The King's Daughter' and threw firecrackers on stage, causing the actors to
flee.

During the chaos they opened fire
and executed four On Leongs in a hail of more than 100 bullets that shattered
windows and split benches.

Two civilians also died, showing
that Chinatown was not safe for outsiders, including whites.

There were two who did it get
away, though. The first was Sing Dock, who was known as the 'Scientific Killer'
due to his forensic approach to murder. The other was Yee Toy, known as 'Girl
Face' for his effeminate features.

The On Leongs did not even wait a
week before seeking revenge and set upon Hop Lee, a laundryman who was a Hip
Sing and friend of Mock Duck, with a meat cleaver.

Seligman writes: 'Hop had been
asleep, police said later said, when five On Leongs forced his door, dragged
him from his bed and stretched him out.

'They might have killed him with
one blow but instead chose torture. The man wielding the cleaver delivered
repeated blows to his body and his head. And in an act of pitiless savagery, he
severed Hop Lee's nose from his face'.

Hop Lee lived long enough to
identify two of his attackers.

As Seligman points out, New
Yorkers had lived through gang wars before and knew one when they saw it.

The national press also took note
and that theater massacre sparked endless features about how New York was in
the midst of a crime wave.

Also among those becoming anxious
was Shah Kai-Fu, the Chinese consul general in the US, who paid a call to the
New York District Attorney to ask him to stop the warfare.

During the coroner's inquest into
the Chinese Theater massacre, Mock Duck gave evidence and claimed that he was nowhere
near the property on the night.

Witnesses said they saw him there
- he was arrested but posted bail and no charges were eventually brought.

A ceasefire signed in 1906 by
both Tongs lasted three years until the most high-profile murder of all happened.

In 1909 the killing of Elsie
Sigel, a 22-year-old white missionary, stopped most whites from going to
Chinatown and once again changed how the city saw the Tong Wars.

Sigel was the granddaughter of a
Civil War hero and was strangled with a curtain cord and dumped in a trunk
above a chop suey restaurant.

Her decaying remains were found a
week later.

The murder was said to be a crime
of passion reportedly committed by a Chinese waiter called Leon Ling, with whom
she had been having an affair against her parents' wishes - he was never
apprehended.

That year, as Chinatown business
struggled with 70 per cent less visitors than before, the conflict among the
Tongs escalated over the murder of Bow Kum, a 21-year-old Chinese woman.

She was found in her bed having
been slashed across her torso and gored twice in her heart with a 7-inch
hunting knife.

She had fled enslavement in San
Francisco to Lau Tong, a known murderer who was in the Four Brothers, another
gang.

When Lau Tong heard she was in
New York he confronted Chin Lem, an On Leong laundryman and her new lover, but
he refused to pay $3,000 for her and would not hand her back. The details of
the crime remain unsolved.

Seligman says that the killing
led to an 'out-and-out war' between the Four Brothers and the On Leongs that
broke out in September 1909 when a Four Brothers laundryman was shot outside
the On Leong head office.

During the carnage two Four
Brothers men in their 70s were shot dead in a room on Pell Street.

Next to die was Ah Hoon, a comic
and an On Leong supporter who had in the past mocked the Hip Sings.

He was gunned down despite having
a police escort as he feared for his life.

The killers waited until he was
home and shot him as he left his front door to wash himself at the washstand
across the hall.

The violence lasted until 1911
and saw The Hip Sing aligned with the Four Brothers to take down the On Leongs,
their old adversary.

A raid of an opium den on Seventh
Avenue led officers to find letters that revealed a massive opium ring
throughout major cities, which led the FBI to investigate.

The Third Tong War erupted in
1912, and by 1913 many of the gambling and opium dens were shut down, but that
was not the end of the Tong Wars.

A fourth in 1925 when Chin Jack
Lem, a senior On Leong, defected to the Hip Sings.

Shortly after a Hip Sing
laundryman was shot dead in Brooklyn and in the days after there were similar
reports of violence in Chinese communities in Pittsburgh, Boston, Philadelphia,
Detroit and Milwaukee.

In New York, a 30-year-old On
Leong and a 64-year-old On Leong were butchered; the latter had nearly been
decapitated and his body was covered with 14 slash marks.

Fearing a return to the bloodshed
of the early 20th Century Joab Banton, the New York County District Attorney,
called in the federal government to start an unprecedented crackdown on Chinese
immigrants.

During raids carried out over the
next week or so, they arrested anyone who looked Chinese with little regard for
their rights.

The crackdown worked and finally
brought an end to the Tong Wars.

As Seligman writes: 'No other
immigrant group had ever been targeted the way the authorities were going after
the Chinese.

'Italian and Irish émigrés had
fought their share of brutal gang wars, but nobody had ever rounded them up for
wholesale expulsion.

'Yet this time, the government
was acting as if the only way to bring peace to Chinatown were to get rid of
its Chinese, through whatever means necessary.'